On the morning of the third day I got a hit.
“Mayday mayday mayday this is Corsa in distress. Can anybody hear my mayday? Over”
We heard a big crackle, then silence, then, “Yes I hear your mayday. Over.”
Joe sat up straight. He grabbed the maps.
“Who is this? Where are you? Can you call the coast guard? Over.”
“ My name is Fred Whitney and I’m on a ham radio in Delaware. Yes, I can call the coast guard and anyone else you want. I’m in a wheel chair so that’s all I can do or else I would come save you myself.”
Joe held up the map and frantically pointed where he thought we were, which was south east of Andros Island.
“Can you call Dana at this number and tell him we think we are south east of Andros Island. Here are the coordinates we think we are at.” I read the coordinates to Fred and for the first time I thought I might get out of there. Within an hour a Coast Guard Jet came flying overhead. He spoke over the radio just as clear as can be.
“Corsa in distress, this Coast Guard Rescue CJ-4 flying over head. We are dropping a case of provisions for you until the chopper arrives which will be in an hour. There is a rope attached. Pull the rope. DO NOT get in the water. There are sharks all around the boat. Over.”
They dropped a steel waterproof suitcase in the water about 300 feet from the boat with a rope attached that came directly across our boat. I thought that is one good pilot. I pulled the rope till the suitcase got close to the boat and pulled it up. Inside was fried chicken, ice cubes, fruit juice, chocolate, bread, cheese, and some first aid stuff. We were shoving everything in our mouths at the same time, eating like we hadn’t eaten in weeks, not days. When were done I looked at Joe.
“Helicopter will be here soon. Tomorrow we will come back for you.”
“I aint staying here.” Joe said.
“Yeah you are. You are the captain, remember.”
“Doesn’t matter. I aint staying here. My wife and kids are probably worried sick.”
“If you leave and no one is here to watch the boat, those Bahamians that have been passing every day are gonna take the boat.”
“Let ‘em. I aint staying.”
“Frank is gonna be pissed. Those guys are gonna steal the boat.”
Joe was ignoring me at this point. I was right and he knew it. He had to stay with the boat. Or else there wasn’t gonna be no boat.
In about an hour a Coast Guard Helicopter came and rescued us. They dropped down a basket and I climbed in first, then they lowered it and Joe got in.
The chopper pilot turned and looked at both of us. “What were you guys doing way out here? There’s nothing out here.”
“We were going diving, but the boat broke and we drifted.” I said hoping he would believe me. I doubt he did.
“You guys drifted about a hundred miles over night. Lucky for you that guy heard your mayday. Else you might have died out here.”
He knew we were out here to smuggle. If we had already picked up the load he would be taking us straight to jail, not the Coast Guard Rescue station,
Inside the Helicopter was a panel of all kinds of gauges and switches. One of them said DAYLIGHT.
“Whats that? The Daylight.” I asked him.
He turned back around and looked me square in the eye.
“We put that on people who are smuggling drugs into our country at night. We get over them and turn it on and all of a sudden its daylight. No where to hide.”
“Oh.”
He kept staring at me for a reaction but I didn’t give him any. I knew we were scraping back to freedom by the skin of our teeth.
When we got back, Joe had hell to pay. Him and Frank got in a huge fistfight for leaving the boat while we all watched. It wasn’t my fault so I didn’t get in any trouble.
The next day Frank and a few of his buddies took another boat out there, fixed the first one and brought it back. I knew I would go again, I needed money to get out of Florida. I wanted to go back to California. I figured if I stayed in Florida I would keep smuggling cause it’s what everyone did. Simple math was I knew if I stayed home sooner or later I would be dead or in jail. Those are the odds, and it’s a sure bet.
About a month later Joe went out again. I told Gary I would never go out with that asshole again and I am sure he felt the same way about me. This time Joe went with a real cool friend of ours named Jungle Johnny. Johnny had a Panther tattoo on his shoulder that said JUNGLE JOHNNY over it. He had survived three tours of Viet Nam and now spent most of his time gambling and partying. And to support those habits he smuggled. Johnny was way cool, always relaxed.
When Johnny and Joe went I was one of the guys waiting in the house to offload the bails. Everyone is always intently listening to the radio. AT 9:30 P.M. we got a radio transmission that everything was fine, they were waiting for the drop off. At 10:30 P.M. one hour later we got another Transmission. It was Johnny saying they were taking on water.
That was the last thing we ever heard from them again. Three days later Dana had to go tell Joe’s wife that Joe was a smuggler and we lost him at sea. I waited in the truck. It didn’t go over too well. She had no idea Joe was a smuggler. About a year later we heard they were locked up in a Cuban jail. After three trips and thousands of dollars spent to find them, it turned out to be another guy with a Panther tattoo on his shoulder.
The Ocean commands respect. If you aint careful, it will swallow you up.
26
“Wake up Mon, we gotta get movin.” Montgomery said. “Gotta be in the Bahamas by nightfall or else they gonna make me do maneuvers again. An I HATE doin maneuvers so GET YA RAS ASS UP.”
I had moved to Jamaica to continue my smuggling experience. I went from boats to Planes always and only filled with weed. I figured same reward less risk, but what did I know. I was just another dumb teenager living my adventure.
I had gotten busted in the Bahamas with a boat load of weed a while back, and while I was in that Bahamian jail I met a guy who had crashed ten planes and walked away from every crash. He was a real tall skinny white Jamaican guy named Montgomery. Monty for short, but yo had to know hm real good to call him Monty. Not too many people did. He was as cool as can be, I mean cool like the Fonz, in a Jamaican sort of way. When you meet some one in jail, you know they are cool, well usually they are, truth is you never really can tell these days.
Educated in Europe and America, he used to fly for one of the big airlines like Pan Am before he got into smuggling full time. His parents owned this really cool hotel that was carved into the side of a mountain outside of Kingston. He invited me to come live in Jamaica and work for him when we were in the Bahamian jail so I had finally took him up on it.
They gave me my own room on one side of the hotel that was kind of in renovation. We didn’t smuggle all the time so I spent a lot of time by myself adventuring around. There was always something to do. In the mornings I would take a cab, the same cab driver would pick me up every day and take me to one of the two places that had surfable waves on the island. The closest and best spot was right behind the Donald L Quarrie elementary school. Donald L. Quarrie was a famous Jamaican track and field guy. I think he went to the Olympics or something. Anyway the waves broke perfect behind this school. From two foot to twenty feet it broke perfect and like Pipeline. There were a handful of kids that surfed there, no more than five, and they ripped. At lunchtime or recess all the kids would come out from the school and watch us surf. The wind would turn onshore by noon so I would go back to the hotel and see what trouble I could get into. They had a furniture factory near the hotel so there was always a bunch of guys there working, cooking breadfruit and akee and salt fish, and smoking tons and tons of weed.
“See my mom on the way out, she got some sandwiches for us an HURRY UP.” Montgomery said laughing all the way down the hall. I put some clothes on and hurried down the hall, grabbed the sandwiches and jumped in the back of the truck with six other guys. We drove up into
the Hills to where Montgomery had his own airport.
When I say airport I mean a big hangar to store planes and a make shift air strip to take off and land planes. We got there and everyone jumped out of the truck and got to work. Gotta get the plane ready, gotta load bales, gotta make sure everything is straight. Montgomery had a special seat made which was an extra gas tank. There are no seats in the plane, we would stuff it full of weed and and then me and Harold would get in and they shut the door behind us. This is straight smuggling at it’s finest. Adrenalin is pumping, we got ‘Record Breaker’ painted on the door and the music is Blasting as we take off.
It’s about four hours to the Bahamas in a non pressurized cabin, which is no fun I can tell you. It feels like your sinuses are gonna break out of your face. I was literally pushing on them as hard as I could.
We came in so low over the houses in the Bahamas I could see the dials on people’s watches. We hit the ground on a very bumpy make shift airstrip. Montgomery was cursing out loud trying to keep the plane from flipping over as it ran down the airstrip. We had stopped on a field surrounded by Australian Pines with nothing on it but a panel truck.
“LETS GO BOYS MOVE THAT SHIT. WE GOTTA GO. TWO MINUTES.” Montgomery walked casually over to the wing to fill up his zippo with jet fuel. He smoked these specially rolled tobacco cigars he had made just for him and he loved how jet fuel smelled when he lit them.
We unloaded that plane in less than a minute and got in shutting the door behind us.
“BETTER HANG ON.” Montgomery screamed over the roar of the engines. 400 feet is not a lot of airstrip to take off in, even for a little Cessna plane. He held the break as long as he could then let go. That plane started screaming down the runway. All three of us looking at the two hundred feet tall pine trees in front of us.
“Come on…….COME ON. We gotta get up to speed or we never gonna make it.” Montgomery said very very seriously. As we got so close that it was getting scary, the wheels came off the ground and we barely cleared the Pines. Me and Harold rolled to the back of the plane and where held there with G forces until we leveled off. We turned around and made a real big circle as if we were just arriving from Jamaica.
“This is the Record Breaker arriving from Jamaica requesting a landing field. Over.” Montgomery turned back to us.
“This is the moment of truth.”
“What do you mean?”
“If he knows we have been on the ground already.” Montgomery’s attention went back to the radio.
“What? Ok Leveling off at fifteen thousand feet. Yes sir.” Montgomery covered the mouthpiece with his hand.
“He’s making me do maneuvers. But I can tell we’re all good.”
We did maneuvers for an hour before he let us land. Maneuvers are like maintain this altitude for this long and that type of shit. They knew we were probably on the ground already but they could not prove it. His flight plan would never show it. So they always made him do a bunch of maneuvers before we landed.
We always stayed in a classy hotel and Montgomery walked around like a king. Full of class he always tipped big. Money came to him in big suitcases so he handed it out almost as easily. Before we would go back to Jamaica, every time he would buy sneakers and soccer balls and clothes and toys and whatever else people needed or wanted on our way back to the hotel.
He had gold tips on his cowboy boots and a twenty five thousand dollar Rolex on his wrist.
“Ya see dis watch.” He held it up to my face. “When a mon see dis watch on my wrist in a meetin he knows I mean bizness, ya unnerstan? Dis watch is serious bizness.”
We landed at a commercial airport after we unloaded the weed but the plan was to build a new airstrip for clandestine landings. We scouted around until we found a good spot and for the next week I spent every day cutting down crocus plants and leveling the field. Every now and then Montgomery would come out and check on our progress then back to the hotel to relax. Montgomery didn’t do the grunt work.
Smuggling was a big deal in the late seventies. Especially in South Florida, the Bahamas and Jamaica. If you were in any way cool just growing up you would get offered a chance to unload a boat, or go on a ride if your balls were big enough. I have always been a climber. Got somewhere to be, even if I’m not sure exactly where that somewhere is.
All the guys in the network that came to build the airstrip were really into getting loaded. Crack was not invented yet, but free base cocaine was really hitting the Bahamas hard. These guys would work in the hot sun all day then go to house and buy based up cocaine and smoke it in bent beer cans right in front of the house. They wouldn’t even make it twenty feet. The entire curb in front of the house would be covered in Bahamians and smugglers all smoking cans. All I was into was weed so I would walk back and forth with Harold and watch him freak out smoking that shit. Fortunately for me I was into going down not up, or else I would have fallen into that trap.
We got the airstrip built, they guy showed up and paid for the weed we brought and we got ready to go back to Jamaica. Harold went and a big back of rocks to take back and when we got back to the hotel he stayed in his room for a week. I went back to Surfing every day waiting to go on a run again.
27
“So you really thought this through?”
“Absolutely. We gotta branch out. We canna keep doin the same route. The DEA is gonna get on our ass. We gonna go meet dis guy and see what dis place has to offer.”
We passed through security, which was almost nonexistent back then and got on a Pan Am plane to Caracas Venezuela. Montgomery had set up a meeting to see if it could work to fly to Colombia first pick up a load then drop it off in the water for a boat to pick up. Doing drops like that was always pretty damn scary. Gotta strap your self in with this little hook and a cable around your waist and as the pilot would fly down low over the water. We would break a cylume so it glowed and strap to the bales and throw out six bales at a time. The boat would pick them up and we would repeat the process until the plane was empty. Then the boat would drive to Miami and unload the weed into a million dollar house.
We landed in Caracas and a real big fat guy Named Carlito picked us up from the airport with one of his workers, I never found out that guys name. He drove us through town to his house. Everywhere we went everyone waved at him and he waved back. We stopped to get some food and they gave it to him free. He tried to pay but they would not take his money.
“He must be really important.” Montgomery said impressed.
We got to the guys house and his wife came out with Coffee con Leche, and the nicest pastries you ever ate. Fresh hot from the oven. We sat there and tried to have a conversation but we didn’t speak Spanish and he didn’t speak English. We used a lot of hand gestures. He drew a map of the way were going to travel to show us the airstrip he wanted us to land at. It was in the Guarjira peninsula in Colombia.
Montgomery got up to use the bathroom and when he came out he sat down with a grin.
“You should go wash up.”
“I’m good.’
“Lissen mon, I wan ya to go wash up. Den you gonna see why we ok.”
I got up and went in the house and on every picture was the guy in full police uniform. Pics of him in the Academy and arresting folks and all kinds of Cops shit.
I came back outside and I looked a little spooked, Montgomery just looked at me and laughed. He looked at the big fat guy who picked us up.
“You Policia?”
The big guy said something in Spanish to his friend and they both laughed real heard. Then he leaned in to Montgomery and pointed at himself.
“Me es Numero Uno Policia. Polica Capitan.” He beat his chest and laughed REALLY loud.
“Told you we were good. Carlito is the Chief of Police” Carlito looked at me and laughed some more.
Montgomery relaxed. I was beginning to like this situation.
We woke up the next day early and got in a Jeep that had a back cover on it. It was Carlito driving
with Montgomery in the front seat, There were two of Carlitos henchmen in the back so I had to lay down in the back of the Jeep.
As soon as we left Venezuela we hit the desert, or what I would imagine the desert to be. There was nothing but sand rocks and cactus for as far as your eyes could see. The road was bumpy as hell and I spent the next five hours being beaten up and down side to side in the back of that Jeep. Carlito would drive like he was on the highway and there was literally NO road.
After about two hors on the road we pulled up to this little building. Literally in the absolute middle of nowhere, with about six Guajira Indians standing in front. I don’t know how they had ice cold coca colas, but they did. I really needed to smoke some weed.
“I really need to smoke a joint Monty. Can you ask this guy?”
“You better chill out wit dat mon. You shoulda brought some wit ya.”
“How the HELL was I gonna bring some with me?”
“In ya pocket mon.”
Montgomery was not a smoker so he really could care less. He didn’t party much at all, and to be honest I don’t think he was in dire straights as far as money went either. He was more like an adrenalin Junkie, Smuggling REALLY was an adventure for Montgomery.
The Guajira Indians were as cool as can be. I showed them how to flick a bottle caps from your fingers and they were amazed. We got along great after that despite any language barrier.
Totally chill, they didn’t have anything and they didn’t mind at all. They ate Goat three times a day. Goat meat, Goat cheese, Goat milk, there was not a lot out there. And me being a vegetarian all I could have was some bread and goat cheese. Three days of that and you are ready to have ANYTHING else.
We drove about three more hours and we got to a village where the Indians lived at. The next day we were going to look at airstrips. Carlito motioned for us to get in the Jeep and go with him.
Becoming A Son Page 12
